


Scars

by JustaGibbsgirl



Series: Six Degrees of Jaqueline Sloane [6]
Category: NCIS
Genre: F/M, Slibbs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-30
Updated: 2020-07-30
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:46:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25607584
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JustaGibbsgirl/pseuds/JustaGibbsgirl
Summary: A case study of Special Agent Jacqueline Sloane
Relationships: Jethro Gibbs/Jacqueline "Jack" Sloane
Series: Six Degrees of Jaqueline Sloane [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1847821
Comments: 9
Kudos: 52





	Scars

**Author's Note:**

> Last installment of the series for the moment, however there's definitely more than 6 layers to this intricate woman. I'm sure I can find 6 more if I dig deep enough.

As promised, she was at his doorstep at 0600, garden tools in hand, ball cap hiding the California sunshine that was a constant source of his distraction. He drank in the ragged denim shorts, loose plaid shirt and forest green tank top that dipped just enough to wet his curiosity.   


**

  
His feeble attempt at an argument had fallen on deaf ears the night before. Beers and a back porch had won the popular vote (namely hers) and after dinner she had taken inventory of the weeds and greenery from the comfort of the space next to him on the porch swing. The slow movement of the swing had lulled his eyes shut, and in his mind's eye, the garden became real to him again. Shannon, standing, hands on hips, head tilted, mapping out the flowers in her head. So detailed, so exact, shade flowers complementing sun and vice versa. Kelly, pulling on his arm, dragging him round to each hole she had dug, proudly displaying each worm she had unearthed.

  
Jack had shifted in the seat next to him, her hand carefully finding his, her smooth fingers lacing with his weathered ones. Drifting open at her touch, his eyes had silently wandered over the unkempt garden that had once been his pride. Pride, if for no other reason than he had been able to share it with the woman who had been the center of his universe. God, how he missed them. 

  
**

  
Not knowing what memories would overwhelm him, what scars would become fresh again, he had allowed her to start the process ahead of him. He gave her a flimsy excuse about needing something (anything) from the basement. Seconds dragged to minutes until he was positive she would be sending a search team if he didn’t come up for air. Still trying to distance himself from the memories, he walked through the house and his voice carried out through the screen door. “Gonna start unloading the mulch from the truck.”

  
“Wait. Before you start…,” her voice drifted off as she heard his footsteps behind her. “I can’t reach my back.” Sitting on the back porch steps, she handed the bottle of sunscreen over her shoulder. The words fell between them as if she asked him every day, when in reality, it was something he was almost fearful of. Almost. He had seen her scars, from a distance and up close. She would occasionally slip off her suit jacket to wash dishes and her camisole underneath left her wounds open to his careful gaze. But other than a few featherlight traces of his fingers over them while pulling a blanket over her sleeping figure, his touch hadn’t found its way to those particular memories. He knew that she trusted him implicitly. He knew that the trust extended to not only her physical scars but to the ones that were more than just skin deep. Taking the sunscreen bottle from her outstretched hand, he lowered himself to the step above her, legs straddling either side.

  
His eye made quick work of the exposed skin while he spoke, his mind matching each line to her darkest moments. “Didn’t make it too long in that flannel.”

  
Slim shoulders shrugged as she settled her arms on her knees. “Warmer than I thought it’d be.”

  
For him, the internal scars damn near outweighed the sum of the physical ones. The marks on his body weren’t distinguished. They didn’t give him a sense of pride or glory. They were battle wounds. All part of the job, all in a day's work. But hers? Hers were more than just skin deep. The raised flesh in front of him, he would bet, carried nerves all the way to her soul. As a man, as a human, his heart immediately took the leap to his stomach when she flinched slightly at the coolness of the lotion against her skin. He knew it wasn’t from pain. Wasn’t from surprise either. Just a jumpiness that never seemed to leave even after their feet had hit American soil again. 

  
He patiently smoothed the lotion over her shoulders. He felt her give into the moment, if only briefly, as his hands worked horizontal lines across her bare back down to the fabric of her shirt. He read the scars with his fingertips, as if he was reading the Book of Sloane written in Braille.

  
It was a book that, three years ago, he was certain would be an easy read. With each passing day though, he found it was a book that he had no intention of ever putting down. 

  
She knew that he was processing her skin as he spread the lotion, embedding each raised line to memory. Thankful for the silence that the man behind her was so fond of, she closed her eyes and simply let the moment exist between them.

  
Three years into their friendship and his lack of a visual on her scars had less to do with shame or embarrassment and everything to do with opportunity. He had never asked, she had never offered. The moment of clarification in her office had been just that - clarification. Laying her cards on the table so that Leroy Jethro Gibbs knew exactly the kind of fire he was jumping into when blue eyes met brown. That brief but powerful show and tell moment had shown them both that the threads that they had been using to sew up their bleeding hearts each day were somehow entangled around the same spool.

**

  
She was cross legged along the garden’s edge, gloved hands meticulously removing each offending weed from its place of residence. The wheelbarrow teetered and bounced as he made his way across the yard towards her. The sunlight fell across her back, highlighting again the wounds that had only healed from the outside.

  
Each trip across the grass granted him another minute of unobtrusive exploration. And although he had never asked, never so much as questioned, with his words, his eyes, or with his body, he knew that she would give the information freely and even willingly if the opportunity ever arose. But it never had.

  
So, like shards of shattered glass, he was left to assemble back together each broken piece as it became available to him. Like a puzzle without a picture to go by.

  
Stopping next to her, she smiled up at him, eyes barely visible under the ballcap as he offloaded the final bag of mulch. Her hand gestured to the bags polka dotted across the yard. “Think that’ll be enough?”

  
So weighted were those words to him. So much more than bags of mulch at his feet. He looked down at her, dirt smudged across her cheek, chocolate eyes softening as they met his. The air seemed to leave his lungs all at once, his heart hammering against his ribcage, knowing that it would absolutely never be enough for him. But in this moment, it was.

  
“For now. Hardware store’s open all day.”

  
She nodded and turned back to the last section of dirt. Grabbing a stack of newspapers from the cart next to her, he headed to one end of the garden bed to begin preparing for the multitude of mulch that came next. His knees protested vehemently after the initial descent to the soil and beyond the initial sharp intake of breath, she would never have known his pain if she hadn’t been so finely attuned to his body.

  
All attempts to focus on the derelict greenery came to a crashing halt when her peripheral vision caught the pause of the man at the far end of the flower trail. 

  
Crouched in front of the landscaping, rocked back on his heels, hands resting on his thighs, she saw the slow shuddering breath that made his shoulders slump slightly.

  
Her eyes drifted to the plant that his hands were drawn to. Easily recognized as a rose, she watched the delicate way in which his fingers smoothed over the leaves, lingering for whispers of moments before tracing the stem down to meet the dirt, the morning dew following the trail his fingertips had created. She could almost be envious of that flower if the grief that twisted his features wasn’t so pronounced. 

  
The tilt of his head told her that he was remembering something. Something he knew but had pushed down. His hands slowly began pushing aside soil. After each swipe of dirt, he paused, as if the very next movement would cause him to physically break. 

  
The soft set of his features told her that whatever this memory was at his fingertips, it held him captive. No chains, no shackles, but captive in the most familiar and heart wrenching of ways.

  
The faintest sound of a fingertip tapped against metal pricked at her ears. Curiosity baited her but reverence for the man and his memory kept her rooted to the ground beneath her.

  
One hand pressed against the metal box, eyes pressed closed, his daughter’s voice suddenly lit up the space around him. Smiles and freckles and braids. Giggles and “Daddy, watch this” and cartwheels. 

  
He let himself reside in the very middle of that scar, in the middle of that memory for the length of two long shuddering breaths. But not a second more.

  
His fist clenched in his lap but uncurled as a different feeling slipped quietly past the sadness. Why was it different this time? Why was the unearthing of this particular memory different this time than any other? He knew the answer before his mind even finished asking the question.

  
Jack.

  
No other explanation made sense next to that one. He was a distinctly different man than he was three years ago. She had created a calm in him, pulling from him things that no woman, save for Shannon, had been able to. But had he allowed her that knowledge? Had he given her any indication that her existence in his life had allowed his scars to soften and become easier to bear? What, if anything, would it cost him to allow her access to the deepest of his wounds? 

  
His brow furrowed and a frown pulled tight on his lips, silently answering the questions his mind berated him with. The thought of her scars, her pain, her losses...how could he be so callous and asinine to believe that the heaviness of his outweighed the gravity of hers?

**

  
Scars are a bitch, she thought, watching him pull his hand back suddenly as if it had been badly burned. And it wasn’t always the physical or even emotional lacerations that layed you open, raw and bare. It was the scars that hitched themselves to a memory, to an inanimate object that you never considered an enemy until it open fired under the guise of being an ally. Physical healed, she was a sure testament to that. Emotional knows you intimately, day in and day out, a continuous, never-ending reenactment between heart and mind.

  
But that picture hanging in the hallway of the OB ward of the hospital that she had walked past exactly one hundred and seventeen times before her water had broken? And then, years later in a dilapidated Afghanistan hospital, waiting with a broken child in her arms, that same picture assaulted her from the waiting room chair. It had traveled miles, crossed oceans, just to prove that the wound was still fresh and would never heal as cleanly as the ones across her back.

  
As she watched him, she saw the shadows drop across his features even as the sun lit his face. Instinct hit first and the need to protect overwhelmed her. It took an immeasurable amount of strength to remain in place, to not close the fifteen paces between them. To not beg the question that was on the tip of her tongue. She gripped the garden spade a little tighter in her hand, the flowers in front of her suddenly drained of their color.

  
She pierced the soil over and over, the weeds now her mortal enemy as her mind became distracted by the flower garden as a whole. Looking around, she surveyed the landscaping. There was a myriad of women to choose from when it came to possible keepers of this garden.

  
Ultimately, her mind came to rest on Shannon. And Kelly. Her eyes drifted shut and she could picture Gibbs patiently allowing his daughter to dig holes that weren’t deep enough, to drop in 37 seeds when 2 would suffice, and the water fight that she was sure had ensued once the hose was turned on. Her chest felt tight as she thought about memories that weren’t even hers.

  
He at least had moments in time. He at least had smiles and freckles and painted fingernails that his heart could latch onto. She had none of those. Just a heavy, throbbing ache where they should have been. The innermost of her scars. The wound that had settled so far down that when the salt hit it ( and it always did), it seared with pain, the openness of it still so raw it caused her to lose her breath some days. 

  
But those memories that she was so jealous of, the ones that she would give up so much of herself for, wouldn’t he argue that those memories were what trapped him, burdened him, chained him all these years? She swallowed hard at the lump in her throat. Fighting for control of her breathing, she rocked back on her heels, just as he had done earlier.

  
All at once she was aware of him, his scent drifting past the memories. Two glasses of lemonade in his hands, his smile was sad but hopeful as she finally found the courage to meet his eyes.

  
“Take a break?” The offer was made with a nod towards the porch, his eyes asking the bigger question. Not trusting her voice just yet, she shook her head in agreement, matching his steps towards the back porch.

  
The short width of the steps allowed not even a breath between them as they took slow sips of the cool drinks. Side by side, they took stock of the previous hours accomplishments.

  
He felt the air change between them all at once as she shifted against the weathered wood beneath them. He didn’t want her to have to be the one to start. If he had a dollar for every moment of concern, every “but how are YOU doing, Gibbs,” every soft touch on his arm, every hand held in worry for him, he’d be building a goddamn yacht in his basement instead of the simple sailboat that now graced it. He owed it to her to start the conversation. 

  
But it wasn’t his own voice that he heard. It was hers. Soft and husky, battered and bruised, her words, her scars fell over them both.


End file.
